One day in prison, however, a smuggled message reached him. "Dear Rochester," it said. "I was sorry to hear of your predicament. Don't worry, I'm taking steps to put things right." It was from the leader of the National Union of Railwaymen. A soldier from Rochester's platoon, home on leave, had got word to him that a union member was in prison, and why. Before long, news reached Rochester that his conviction had been overturned and he was to be released. His union chief had been to see the secretary for war, who was willing to do a favor for a union so crucial to the war effort.
Rochester was assigned to a new post in the crews running British military trains in France. This was not without its dangers, for railways were key targets for what he wryly called "pleasant little periods of shelling and bombing." But it was surely preferable to night patrols in no man's land. Rochester talked politics with French railway unionists, and scoffed at the grandly luxurious train of the director general of transport for the British forces: "Bath-rooms, smoke-rooms, dining-rooms; from pins to pile carpets, and libraries to slippers and champagne, it was a moving club ... of cooks, valets, sergeant-majors, and commissioned duds." He was grateful to be alive, but vowed that once he was free to do so, he would tell the story of his three fellow prisoners who had not been so lucky.
***
Befitting the unprecedented scope of the war, Lloyd George's War Cabinet was something new in British politics. It was not a subcommittee of the full cabinet, but five men entrusted with total responsibility for waging the war. Central to it was the working relationship that developed between Lloyd George and Milner, as strong as it was unlikely. The prime minister was a Liberal and his new minister without portfolio a Conservative; Lloyd George, whose impoverished father died young, had been brought up partly by his uncle, a shoemaker, while the Oxford-educated Milner moved easily among the country's elite; Lloyd George had one of the golden tongues of his era—in English and his native Welsh—while Milner was a poor public speaker, with a voice people found squeaky or reedy. A decade and a half earlier, the Boer War had bitterly divided them, but with Britain now in the battle of its life, the two men turned out to be superbly compatible. The somewhat eccentric prime minister began each morning by drinking a strange concoction of eggs, honey, cream, and port; then he, the chief of the Imperial General Staff, and Milner would meet at 11 A.M. with an aide taking notes; only at noon would the other members of the War Cabinet join them. Milner was in the inner circle within the inner circle.
Because Milner so lacked any common touch, Lloyd George knew that he could never become a political rival. Instead, the prime minister recognized in him a world-class administrator with an eye for talent and for cutting red tape. He gave him plenty of leeway, and Milner in short order became the second most powerful civilian in Britain. A photograph from this time shows him in a bowler hat, gloves in one hand, umbrella in the other, taking a long, purposeful stride along Downing Street, restored to power at last. As 1917 began, he drew members of his old South African Kindergarten of bright young Oxford graduates into government positions: an undersecretaryship here, a head of a bureau there; one Kindergarten member was even installed as a private secretary to the prime minister. "Milner men," as the press called them, soon filled many of the temporary huts built for an overflow of wartime office space in the backyard of 10 Downing Street, known as the Garden Suburb. The president of Milner's British Workers' League was promptly made minister of labor. Wanting to put a higher priority on propaganda, Milner promoted his longtime protégé John Buchan to a powerful new post, director of information, reporting to Lloyd George. Buchan was surely pleased, for, beneath his affable public exterior, his letters show him to have been a man of keen ambition for high office. As prodigious a worker as ever, he continued to write installments of his multivolume history of the war and his novels, naming a villain in one of them after the man who became his opposite number as propaganda chief in Berlin, Ferdinand Carl von Stumm.
As the staggering scale of British losses at the Somme sank in, the new War Cabinet began questioning Haig's costly battering-ram strategy. Lloyd George suggested sending British arms and men elsewhere, anywhere they wouldn't run up against a solid wall of German barbed wire and machine guns—to Egypt, for instance, for a drive against the Turks. Or why not to Italy, for use against ramshackle Austria-Hungary? But Haig, a shrewd infighter, proved more powerful than his nominal superiors, and saw to it that little strength was diverted to other fronts from his armies in France and Belgium.
In this sub-rosa battle, Haig's cultivation of Lord Northcliffe was crucial, for Lloyd George partly owed his position to the press baron, whose papers had praised him and kept up a drumbeat of criticism that had helped force Asquith to step down. When Lloyd George and the War Cabinet began trying to intervene in military strategy in a way that the mild Asquith had never dared, Haig turned to Northcliffe and confided to his diary that the magnate was "fully alive to his responsibility for putting Lloyd George into power," as well as "determined to keep him in the right lines or force him to resign." Nor did Haig's widely known relationship with the royal family do him any harm. "It gives me great pleasure and satisfaction," King George V wrote to him, "to tell you that I have decided to appoint you a Field Marshal in my Army.... I hope you will look upon it as a New Year's gift from myself and the country."
Haig was safe, but the first major military development of 1917 would not take place on the Western Front—or even on land.
In the previous two years, despite the millions of soldiers killed and wounded, nowhere along its entire length of nearly 500 miles had the front line moved in either direction by more than a few hours' walk. Military history had not seen the likes of this before, and the Germans were no less frustrated than the Allies.
Furthermore, the German government was battling against opponents, east and west, whose combined armies were significantly larger, and on the home front the situation remained dire. In a country already desperately short of food, abnormally severe temperatures froze rivers and canals that usually delivered coal, and millions of city dwellers, as the historian David Stevenson has put it, "endured cold and hunger unknown since pre-industrial times."
Austria-Hungary was in even worse condition, and militarily was more of a burden to Germany than the ally it was supposed to be. Its comic-opera army, rich in splendid uniforms, was weak in everything else, and its government was so inept that for the first eight months of war it had not bothered to stop a Vienna trading firm from doing a booming business selling food and medicine—through neutral countries—to the Russian army. The failure to take Verdun dashed any hopes Germany had for new frontal assaults against either the French or the British. So what was to be done? Like Lloyd George, the Germans were looking for ways around the impasse of the Western Front. And this led them to take one of the great gambles of the war.
Since the conflict began, German submarines had been sinking Allied ships by the hundreds, notoriously torpedoing the British passenger liner Lusitania in 1915. The prime targets were ships crossing the Atlantic, delivering essential food and a wide array of arms and manufactured goods Britain and France were buying from American suppliers. The Germans were wary, however, of sinking American ships, which could provoke the neutral United States into joining the Allies.
Germany's gamble of early 1917 was to declare unlimited submarine warfare, making fair game almost any vessel headed for Allied ports—including those from a neutral country. Cutting off the Atlantic supply lines so crucial to the British and French war effort, the Germans hoped, would force the Allies to sue for peace. The danger of unlimited submarine warfare, of course, was that it was certain to sink American ships and kill American sailors, therefore sooner or later drawing the United States, the world's largest economy, into the war. As reckless as this might seem, the German high command calculated that, even if the United States declared war, severing the Atlantic lifeline would strangle Britain and France into surrender in less than six months, long before
a substantial number of American troops could be trained and sent to Europe. Despite its size the United States had a standing army that ranked only seventeenth in the world. In any case, how would American soldiers cross the ocean? German naval commanders were confident that U.S. troopships and merchant vessels alike would fall victim to U-boats, because Allied technology for locating submarines underwater was still so primitive as to be almost useless.
In January 1917 the Germans sank 171 Allied and neutral ships; in February, after the new declaration, 234; in March, 281; and in April, 373. Measured in tonnage, the losses were even more catastrophic: the Germans sank more than 880,000 tons of merchant shipping in the month of April alone, a pace of destruction high enough to polish off every single cargo ship on the world's oceans in less than three years. And they were managing to inflict this deadly toll with, on average, only 30 submarines on station in the shipping lanes at any given time. One out of four ships leaving Britain to go overseas, the authorities calculated, would not survive to return. Faced with these odds, the captains of hundreds of neutral vessels in British ports refused to sail.
The Germans had finally found a way to hit Britain in its stomach. In the first six months of unlimited submarine warfare, 47,000 tons of meat ended up at the bottom of the ocean, and much larger quantities of other food. Gloom over these losses dominated meetings of the War Cabinet. The U-boats, it seemed, might starve Britain more quickly than the Royal Navy blockade could starve Germany. "In five months at this rate Britain would be forced to her knees," wrote Churchill, adding, "It seemed that Time, hitherto counted as an incorruptible Ally, was about to change sides."
Nothing breeds spy hysteria like a war that is not going well. If food is short and newspapers are filled with reports of ships lost at sea, if soldiers are dying by the thousands but the front line does not move, it is tempting to believe that all this is not just the fault of the enemy but also of unseen traitors at home. British paranoia was fed by many springs, from John Buchan's fast-paced espionage novels to Christabel Pankhurst's Britannia and its shrill denunciations of treacherous Germanophiles in high positions to the aptly named Horatio Bottomley, a demagogic orator and editor who called for conscientious objectors to be taken to the Tower of London and shot.
When panic fills the air, of course, there are careers to be made, high and low, by discovering hidden enemies. England did not lack for people eager to do so, among them Scotland Yard's debonair self-promoter Basil Thomson. Unfortunately for him, bona fide German agents were depressingly rare. Despite efforts to blame factory fires or accidents on them, not a single known act of enemy sabotage took place in Britain during the entire war. And so for the ambitious spycatcher, promotions and publicity meant ferreting out homegrown subversives: typically, at one trade union meeting in Southampton in the middle of the war, two embarrassed detectives were found hiding under a grand piano.
Various government departments rushed to create intelligence units. One such bureau had been set up in 1916 by officials at the new Ministry of Munitions, on edge about a wave of strikes that rippled through factories turning out guns, shells, and other crucial war equipment in the Midlands and along Scotland's River Clyde. There were also rent strikes by Scottish women munitions workers angry over rising prices and inadequate housing.
Unlike many in ruling circles, Alfred Milner acknowledged that workers had genuine problems, including "the bullying and unscrupulousness of some employers ... and profiteering." But once these were dealt with, he believed that the government should "go for the agitators. The removal of grievances alone will not disarm them. They are out for mischief." Soon after he joined the War Cabinet, a flurry of alarmist reports from the Ministry of Munitions intelligence unit landed on his desk. "It is impossible for anybody to say at present to what lengths the coming industrial troubles may be carried," read one. "The general strike may occur." Subversives in the workforce were more prominent than ever—"30 per cent are disloyal and confirmed slackers"—because "Army enlistments have depleted the patriotic element." Worse yet, the report warned, the flood of policemen entering the army had shrunk the forces that normally could keep labor under control at home.
As the historian Sheila Rowbotham points out, the agents who penned these reports were often ex—military men who viewed those they were spying on through the lens of their own experience. Accustomed to clear hierarchies of power and orders promptly obeyed, they saw any strike as provoked by a ringleader and not by high rents or low wages. When they looked at bedraggled, anarchic groups of pacifists they imagined a strict chain of command. FBI surveillance reports on the American antiwar movement of the Vietnam era reflect the same mindset.
The militants, the Ministry of Munitions agents claimed, had devised multiple ways of spreading the signal for a strike to start: "a quadruple line of communication was used, one man going by train, a second by motor car and a third by motor cycle," while a telegram was dispatched with the coded message "Come in Chambermaids." The situation, as the agents saw it, was dire: "We are undoubtedly up against a very dangerous and mischievous organisation ... which is, in reality, an industrial revolution."
The reports that flowed to Milner and a few other officials were studded with cryptic mentions of undercover men: "F" and "B" were supplying useful information, and "V" had managed to befriend a particularly dangerous agitator. An agent code-named "George" reported on a meeting in Sheffield where one speaker said, "What the working classes will have to do, is to refuse to go on making tools for the prosecution of the war."
There were indeed many strikes in Britain at this time, but despite what Keir Hardie had hoped for, they were not directed at the war itself. Inflation was taking a toll on wages, and workers were angry at other ways employers were using the excuse of wartime to undo some of labor's hard-won gains. Still, Hardie's spirit was not dead. Even though many opponents of the war were writers and intellectuals, plenty of them came from the working class.
No Oxford or Cambridge or Bloomsbury lay in the background of John S. Clarke, for example, one man the agents were doing their best to keep an eye on. Born in poverty-stricken County Durham, home to the three executed Bantam soldiers in France, he was the thirteenth of fourteen children, only half of whom survived to adulthood. Clarke's family was in the circus. By the age of 10 he was in the ring, doing tricks while riding a horse bareback with no bridle. At 12 he went to sea, witnessing a murder on board a tramp steamer and getting knifed in a pub on the Antwerp waterfront. He jumped ship in South Africa and lived with Zulu villagers for two months before working his way home. Whenever there was no ship he felt like sailing on, he returned to the family trade. One evening, he had to fill in when a drunken fellow performer tripped over a rope and knocked himself out. That was how, at 17, he found himself in the circus ring as the youngest lion tamer in Britain.
The most dangerous thing about a lion, Clarke later wrote, was not its teeth but its claws. One ill-tempered lion seems not to have realized this, and early in Clarke's career it seized his thigh in its mouth. "I never moved, but talked gently until his jaws relaxed, and still talking, I edged away." Clarke's work with a variety of animals left many a scar on his body. Soon he was caught up in the radical movements of the day, getting arrested in 1906, at the age of 21, for taking part in a conspiracy to smuggle arms from Scotland to revolutionaries in Russia. He had little formal schooling, and essentially educated himself, giving fulsome voice to his politics in articles, pamphlets, and doggerel:
The landlord calls it rent and he winks the other eye,
The merchant calls it profit and he sighs a heavy sigh,
The banker calls it interest and puts it in the bag,
But our honest friend the burglar simply calls it swag.
After various adventures, including running a zoo, Clarke joined the small, militantly left-wing Socialist Labour Party and became an editor and writer for its newspaper, the Socialist. He and his party comrades were fiercely, uncompromisingly against th
e war. "You gave us war," the paper combatively declared. "We in return give you revolution." By the war's end, despite repeated raids and harassment of its printers, the paper would have a circulation of 20,000. It regularly published Clarke's attacks on the war and on industry profiteers, and also celebrated resistance in other countries, printing, for instance, the defiant speech the socialist Karl Liebknecht gave before a German army court-martial in 1916.
The newspaper's readers were concentrated in Scotland and the north of England, where party activists had led some of the strikes that left government intelligence agents so alarmed. After a friendly policeman tipped off Clarke that he was soon to be arrested, he fled Scotland and settled out of sight on a sympathizer's farm near Derby, earning his keep as a laborer while he and several others continued to edit the Socialist underground.
Derby was a center of labor militance, a city of railroad yards, coal smoke, and aging red-brick factories, with plants that made fuses and aircraft engines for the military, as well as parts for rifles and artillery pieces. Whether the spy hunters from the Ministry of Munitions were aware that the area was a clandestine base for Clarke and the Socialist we do not know. But in their hunt for subversives, they put under surveillance the very friend who almost certainly had helped arrange Clarke's hiding place. For undercover operatives looking for glory and advancement, she seemed the perfect target, combining several strands of left-wing activity in a single household.
Matronly and determined-looking, 52-year-old Alice Wheeldon supported herself by selling secondhand clothes out of the front room of a house on Derby's Pear Tree Road. She was known as a woman who brooked no nonsense: when someone once heckled her as she gave a po litical speech, she tapped him on the head with her umbrella. A railway locomotive driver's daughter, she had worked as a house servant when young and was now estranged from her alcoholic husband, a mechanic. One daughter, Nellie, helped Alice in the old-clothes shop; two others, Hettie and Winnie, in their twenties, were schoolteachers, as was Alice's son, Willie, until he was drafted in 1916. Refused status as a conscientious objector, he was now in hiding, hoping to flee the country. The whole family were longtime leftists: Alice and her two teacher daughters had belonged to the Pankhursts' WSPU until it backed the war, and, along with their friend John S. Clarke, they were members of the Socialist Labour Party. Hettie Wheeldon was also secretary of the Derby branch of the No-Conscription Fellowship. Although Winnie was married, she was, the Ministry of Munitions agents eagerly reported, a believer in free love and at one point had been an atheist.